Manning the Barrycades of punitive liberalism

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Way back in January, when it emerged that Beyoncé had treated us to the first-ever lip-synched national anthem at a presidential inauguration, I suggested in this space that this strange pseudo-performance embodied the decay of America's political institutions from the real thing into mere simulacrum. But that applies to government “crises,” too – such as the Obamacare “rollout,” the debt “ceiling,” and the federal “shutdown,” to name only the three current railroad tracks to which the virtuous damsel of Big Government has been simultaneously tied by evil mustache-twirling Republicans.

This past week's “shutdown” of government, for example, suffers from the awkward fact that the overwhelming majority of the government is not shut down at all. Indeed, much of it
cannot be shut down. Which is the real problem facing America. “Mandatory spending” (Social Security, Medicare, et al) is authorized in perpetuity – or, at any rate, until total societal collapse. If you throw in the interest payments on the debt, that means two-thirds of the federal budget is beyond the control of Congress' so-called federal budget process. That's why you're reading government “shutdown” stories about the Panda Cam at the Washington Zoo and the first lady's ghost-Tweeters being furloughed.

Nevertheless, just because it's a phony crisis doesn't mean it can't be made even phonier. The perfect symbol of the shutdown-simulacrum so far has been the World War II Memorial. This is an open-air facility on the National Mall – that's to say, an area of grass with a monument at the center. By comparison with, say, the IRS, the National Parks Service is not usually one of the more controversial government agencies. But, come “shutdown,” they're reborn as the shock troops of the punitive bureaucracy. Thus, they decided to close down an unfenced open-air site – which, oddly enough, requires more personnel to shut than it would to keep it open.

In a heartening sign that the American spirit is not entirely dead, at least among a small percentage of nonagenarians, a visiting party of veterans pushed through the barricades and went to honor their fallen comrades, mordantly noting for reporters that, after all, when they'd shown up on the beach at Normandy, it, too, had not been officially open.

One would not be altogether surprised to find the feds stringing yellow police tape along the Rio Grande, the 49th Parallel and the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, if only to keep Americans in.

Still, I would like to have been privy to the discussions leading to the decision to install its Barrycades on open parkland. For anyone with a modicum of self-respect, it's difficult to imagine how even the twerpiest of twerp bureaucrats would consent to stand at a crowd barrier and tell a group of elderly soldiers who've flown in from across the country that they're forbidden to walk across a piece of grass and pay their respects.

The World War II Memorial exists thanks to some $200 million in private donations – plus $15 million or so from Washington: In other words, the feds paid for the grass. But the bureaucracy wants to send a message: In today's America, everything is the gift of the government, and exists only at the government's pleasure, whether it's your health insurance, your religious liberty, or the monument to your fallen comrades.

The Barrycades are such a perfect embodiment of what James Piereson calls “punitive liberalism” they should be tied round Obama's neck forever, in the way that “ketchup is a vegetable” got hung around Reagan-era Republicans. Alas, the media cannot rouse themselves even on behalf of the nation's elderly warriors.

Meanwhile, Republicans offered a bill to prevent the shutdown affecting experimental cancer trials for children. The Democrats rejected it. “But if you can help one child who has cancer,” CNN's Dana Bash asked Harry Reid, “why wouldn't you do it?”

“Why would we want to do that?” replied the Senate majority leader. For Democrats, the budget is all or nothing. Republican bills to fund this or that individual program have to be rejected out of hand as an affront to the apparent constitutional inviolability of the “continuing resolution.”

In fact, government by “continuing resolution” is a sleazy racket: The legislative branch is supposed to legislate. Instead, they're presented with a yea-or-nay vote on a single all-or-nothing multitrillion-dollar band-aid stitched together behind closed doors to hold the federal leviathan together through to the next budget cycle.

As professor Angelo Codevilla of Boston University put it, “This turns democracy into a choice between tyranny and anarchy.” It's certainly a perversion of responsible government: Congress has less say over specific federal expenditures than the citizens of my New Hampshire backwater do at town meeting over the budget for a new fence at the town dump.

No offense to Sen. Reid, but Republican proposals to allocate spending through targeted, mere multibillion-dollar appropriations is not only
not “irresponsible” but, in fact, a vast improvement over the “continuing resolution”: To modify Lord Acton, power corrupts, but continuing power corrupts continually.

America has no budget process. That's why it's the brokest nation in history. So a budgeting process that can't control the budget in a legislature that can't legislate leads to a government shutdown that shuts down open areas of grassland and the unmanned boat launch on the Bighorn River in Montana.

Up next: the debt ceiling showdown, in which we argue over everything except the debt. The conventional wisdom of the U.S. media is that Republicans are being grossly irresponsible not just to wave through another couple trillion or so on Washington's overdraft facility. Really? Other countries are actually reducing debt: New Zealand, for example, has a real budget that diminishes net debt from 26 percent of GDP to 17 percent by 2020. By comparison, America's net debt is about 88 percent of GDP, and we're debating only whether to increase it automatically or with a few strings attached.

My favorite book of the moment is “The Liberty Amendments,” the new bestseller by Mark Levin – not because I agree with all his proposed constitutional amendments, and certainly not because I think they represent the views of a majority of Americans, but because he's fighting on the right battleground. A century of remorseless expansion by the “federal” government has tortured the constitutional order beyond meaning. America was never intended to be a homogenized one-size-fits-all nation of 300 million people run by a government as centralized as France's. It's no surprise that, when it tries to be one, it doesn't work terribly well.

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